So How Does That, Um, Work? or How I Engage in Guided Hallucination for Fun: “Watching” Blind, Part 2

The more I write my blundering way deeper into this attempt to describe my “watching” process, the more I see this process as one of hallucinating a version of an audio-visual narrative that works for me based on limited cues. This hallucination, the mental “picture” of the film or show I build up, isn’t just shaped by the audible impression I cobble together of what’s happening at any given moment and the visceral reaction I feel the audio content is urging me toward, but also the overall tone created by the plot and dialogue of the piece. I haven’t watched Babylon 5 in its entirety because I don’t have that kind of time this decade, so I feel a little uncomfortable using it as an example, but I think my reaction to it works well as an illustration of what I mean by “tone”. Babylon 5 is a space opera show about a human space station that acts as a diplomatic outpost for multiple very powerful alien species, and the opening narration sets the tone by asking us to imagine “humans and aliens wrapped in two-million five-hundred-thousand tons of spinning metal. All alone in the night.” That conjures a mental image of, well, a space station made of two-million five-hundred-thousand tons of spinning metal, so, okay, there’s a really big-ass wheel or ring or maybe sphere floating in the big cold black of space. But it also overlays a particular mood, of solitude and a certain gravity and theatrical grimness on that image to turn it into the B 5 station specifically and not just any old space habitat. And, with my exploration of the show informed by this tone, I find this initial impression reinforced by dialogue and by events: by one central character’s statement, in response to being asked what he wants in life, that “I want to stop running through my life as if I were late for an appointment”, by the failure of the show’s main characters to stop the tide of galactic politics turning towards war, what in Babylon 5’s inimitable melodramatic but evocative way one character calls “the long, twilight struggle”. In the absence of the ability to take the show in visually as other viewers do, this sense of melancholy theatricality shapes how I hallucinate the station and its people, dulls my imagination of the futuristic grandeur with a faint grime of wear and tear. The people loom larger than life in my mind’s “eye” in the way of heroes in space opera, but they look tired; their shoulders sag a bit; their eyes are haunted, because they have watched worlds burn. I have no idea whether the station is actually dulled by this sheen of realism — quite honestly I suspect the special effects in the early 90s weren’t good enough for us to tell one way or the other –, but I imagine it to be so when I hallucinate the show based on the cues I’ve been given.

Music can have a similarly major effect on my impression of a film or show’s tone and the picture it prompts me to build for myself and my dazed imaginings of the setting and the characters. Think the plaintive flutes and horns and drums of The Lord of the Rings that conjure up, at least for me, a sense of vast wondrous lands still to be crossed, or the inspirational yes-we-can strains of the Star Trek theme. Is the world all shiny? Or beaten down? Are the characters broken, tired around the eyes, weighed down by all the mopey violin getting cranked out in the background? Or are they energized by their mission and the sound of celestial trumpets? (These are extreme examples, of course.) Alternatively, music can provide an essential counterpoint that nuances the mental image, as the fast-paced, vaguely militaristic remix of the Babylon 5 fanfare used for the opening theme in the second season shapes the tone by acting as a contrast to the grave solitude and deepening crisis set up by the bombastic opening narration, sounding a note of defiance and futile optimism in the face of the inexorable slide towards darkness and war that plays out across the season. Music does all this for everyone, of course, the same way dialogue helps set the tone for everyone as well as conveying information, but I think I do rely on these things more heavily than many other viewers. Which is why I sometimes latch onto theme music so single-mindedly and repetitively and hum it for ever and ever. At least that’s my excuse.

I rely on the substantial dialogue most of all, of course. But these scenes sometimes have more pitfalls than you’d think. Even though dialogue-heavy sequences are much more my home turf so far as being able to understand things easily goes, particularly complex scenes of character interplay can actually be tougher to deal with than action, because of what goes unsaid and unmarked by the sound design. One of the key things blindness does away with that is really kind of tough to find a fix for is the ability to read body language and facial expressions. This difficulty is one of the most disorienting things about interacting with other people: Are they happy? Are they sad? How do they feel about what I’m saying to them? About the other things happening around us? Am I annoying them? Are they about to cut me? I really do not know. Of course a lot of this comes through in someone’s voice, but relying on voice only inevitably misses things, sometimes big things. So the long meaningful shots that certain types of films love, where people are sitting alone and thinking thoughts about the midlife crises they’re having and the camera is desperately tracking their every eye movement like it’s being held by someone who knows there’s a prestigious cinematic award in this for them if they just make us look at this poor fucker’s face for long enough, or two people are doing a lot of visual acting with loaded glances and fraught stuff like that, or someone is doing something sneaky without having the courtesy to vocalize their cunning plan, can actually be tougher to work out than a fight with two-hundred people on screen. More meaning tends to turn on these things too. How Elrond and Arwen are looking at each other in the film version of The Two Towers has more long-term significance for the decisions they make and what motivates them than the precise tactical details of how the uruk-hai breach the walls of Helm’s Deep do for the final disposition of the plot, epic as the battle is. (Admittedly this is a really bad example, because Elrond pretty much always sounds like in his mind palace he is seeing himself pissing on all these silly plebeians and their silly ring from a great height and he’s just too old for this shit and you know what? don’t even open your mouth because really there’s just nothing you can say to him, so the scene leaves a little bit of business to the body language but not much I don’t think).

So what about when I just miss these subtle cues completely? When I just can’t figure out any version of what the two people in the super-intricate spy thriller are doing with their sneaking around and their raised eyebrows and their facial innuendo? Well, okay, here are my super secret blindperson “watching” tactics for when the audio and hallucination fail me: 1: Sometimes I just let it go. Because life’s too short. 2: But, if it’s a narrative I’m invested in, then I generally go and ask wikipedia what happened. (These are real disappointing supersecret adaptive techniques, I know. Sorry about that.)

If wiki’s cursory plot summary does not provide, I have two options, only one of which I personally use if I have any choice. 3: I can look for a version of whatever it is I wanna watch with a descriptive audio track specifically for blind people. These are those things where the sound fades out every thirty seconds so a disembodied voice can tell you in pleasant tones what Indiana Jones is doing. I love that these exist, think they’re necessary, would certainly recommend them to other visually impaired people and use them under some circumstances, but I don’t really enjoy them, and would rather put up with a little bit of uncertainty about what’s going on than use them. My objections are several: Back in my youth, when VHS was the only format and we had to watch out for velociraptors and stooping pterodactyls whenever we left our homes, the issue was that the descriptive track was baked directly into the audio you heard on the tape and you couldn’t turn it off, so even once you’d memorized the damn Indy movie you still had the pleasant voice explaining it to you the twenty-seventh time you watched it. Menu-based home video options (DVD and blueray) have gotten rid of this problem, as they transform the descriptive track into just another option to be toggled, but there are still other difficulties. If you’re watching in a group it’s a fairly significant buzzkill for the other people, as the descriptions are probably quite annoying if you don’t need them. They are, unfortunately, also annoying if you do need them, as — while you can tell when listening to how the narration has been placed that every effort is made to avoid this — they sometimes talk over dialogue and important sound cues, which is too bad, and a dealbreaker for me personally. Plus they talk over the music. Which means they talk over John Williams’ Indiana Jones theme. Which isn’t cool. It’s also not easy to find exactly what you want to watch with a descriptive service provided, even if you’re willing to order it and wait. I would, kind of on principle, never opt to watch one thing rather than another thing because it was described. Starwars is great, but if I wanna watch The King’s Speech Starwars will not do.

So, having bitched and moaned my way out of using the resources specifically created for people like me by people who are very good at their jobs, I find myself restricted to option 4: Find tolerant friends who are willing to interrupt their viewing experience with description, and watch whatever it is with them. I’ll talk about the ways this shapes the experience in a separate post, next time I want to procrastinate and feel like writing about it.

So How Does That, Um, Work?, or How I Engage in Guided Hallucination for Fun: “Watching” Blind, Part 1

Whenever I talk about a movie or a tv show I say that I “watched” it. This word choice is unconscious, but on those occasions when I notice it I choose not to modify it. Even though there’s a very real sense in which saying I “watched” something makes me feel like a poser and a liar, because, well, I actually didn’t watch whatever it was, because I’m blind. There are two reasons I prefer the terms “watched” or “saw” when talking about my experience of visual media even though they’re not technically true. 1: I’ve test-driven sentences where I say I’ve “listened” to a movie and they just sound really incredibly stupid. 2: Saying I was “listening” to a film, in addition to sounding dumb — which it does, just wanna keep that front and center –, really doesn’t capture the way anyone, blind or otherwise, interacts with visual media; it’s not like, say, listening to an audio book. Because the visual experience is always there, even if I’m not having it; it’s an integral part of the text and I think it’s important to acknowledge that.

I’d like to think that talking through some elements of the process of “watching” from the perspective of someone who can’t see but likes film and tv — even if he doesn’t watch them that often — might provide some vaguely interesting different angles from which to think about audio/visual storytelling and how its parts work together. Of course, film and tv are often social experiences for lots of us, and I am no exception, and I’ll talk about how relying on the descriptions of kind, long-suffering friends when watching in a group shapes my experience in a future post. But I do watch stuff by myself sometimes (especially dvd box sets of shows I’m interested in and chronically behind-the-times about), so let’s start out by keeping it simple and assuming that there’s nobody around. So then: what elements of audio/visual storytelling do I think I experience differently than people who can see?

I think the place we need to approach this topic from, though I admit I tried to think up a way around it just because it’s so obvious, is my reliance on audio as a blind viewer. There’s a marked tendency, understandably, for people to assume that being blind makes you some manner of ear-ninja and I really don’t think this is the case. I do not, sadly, have super-hearing. I would say rather that if an activity, say kayaking, requires two paddles and you’ve only got one, you’re gonna rely on that paddle like nobody’s business whether you’re any good at using it or not. This sounds like whining to me, and I hope it doesn’t come off that way but rather as a statement of fact: audio/visual entertainment asks you to take in both audio and visual sensory input, and I’ve only got one of those so I use it lots. This makes comprehending action sequences, which are often prominent in the kinds of films I choose to watch, simultaneously frustrating and easier than you might expect. Yes, sure, chase scenes or fights or other action-heavy bits are some of the moments that most obviously confront me with the fact that the movie has not been made with blind people in mind — and of course it hasn’t been, it’s a film. But in a counterintuitive kind of a way action scenes are some of the easiest bits of films to get a general grip on, albeit a vague one, since as long as thuds and cracks and explosions keep happening I continue to have a pretty clear broad idea of what the characters are working on. Lots of the individual audible cues won’t clarify things, but there’s such a multitude of them to draw on that in many cases something will throw me some sort of reference point eventually. I can’t tell what’s exploding, for instance, but I can tell that something’s exploding, and sometimes if I’m lucky even the degree to which it’s exploding, like whether it’s collapsing in a long, grinding slide or poofing all at once. Is there heavy breathing? Then the character’s probably either panicked or running or working hard. I miss the visual stylings that make these scenes distinctive, the stuff that separates the (reportedly) choppy incomprehensible camera work of a Michael Bay film from the action poetry of, say, something directed by Brad Bird or Guilermo Del Toro, but the sheer bulk of audio cues usually present in an action scene makes it almost inevitable that I can get something out of what’s going on, even if it’s not always accurate or complete, and once I have that something I can start to build a narrative scaffolding around it.

One thing I think I lean on a lot more than other people during action beats is incidental dialogue. I get the impression most people don’t listen to this stuff very hard unless it’s one of those one-liners where the sound mix backs off for a second so someone can say something snarky amidst the mayhem. And why would they? Listen, I mean? Batman is flyin’! He has a cape! That’s what’s important! But I grasp at these throwaway lines like handholds, to provide the supplementary information that I need to build a version of the narrative that feels complete. For instance: as the climax to Abrams’ 2009 reboot of Star Trek is beginning, one of the Enterprize’s bridge crew mentions something about the enemy flagship being engaged near … the rings of Saturn I think, and off the Enterprize goes. It ends up being totally irrelevant to the narrative that Saturn is where the climax takes place, but I grabbed onto the useless information to help me mock up some semblance of the scene for myself, whether or not it resembled what was actually on screen. On the way home after the movie the fact that the fight took place near Saturn came up for some reason and my friend’s response was “Dude, you remember that? I was too busy watching the ships go weeeeee.” Are Saturn’s rings actually even in the scene? Damned if I know, but in the moment it doesn’t matter, because all I need is that little incidental bit of dialogue to start fabricating my own version of the movie in my skull and then I feel like I’m engaged with some version of the same narrative as everybody else who’s watching.

The sound design and incidental dialogue, and this isn’t meant to sound as ephemeral and flaky as it does, also provide me a lot of information not just about what’s going on but about how I should feel about it in the moment. The best example I can come up with for how this works is the differing reactions instances of on-screen violence evoke in me depending on how the audio’s delivered. Hits in a fight scene in The Wire or something else that’s focusing on the unpleasantness of the fight, the terrible violence done to bodies, impress themselves on the ear very differently than the punches and weapon hits in a James Bond movie or a Marvel film; where the former prompt a visceral wince, a sympathetic curling of fingers and stomach muscles, the latter may be heavy and aggressive but don’t give the same sense of bone-crunching, flesh-pulping damage. One type of hit is an “owowowowow oh this is awful” sound effect. The other is a “kapow!” “biff!” “woo!” sound effect.

But sometimes a sound designer gets aggressive and wobbles a bit out of tune with the movie’s visual message, maybe on purpose, or an actor really goes the extra mile with their reaction to a hit, and the audio sounds (to me) a lot more horrific than the visual shot probably looks. You know when Bane breaks Batman’s back in The Dark Knight Rises? That’s an R-rated noise (though I wouldn’t be surprised if the scene pushes what its rating can get away with visually; I don’t know). The Cabin in the Woods is an R-rated horror film, so will naturally tend in a more aggressive direction with its audio cues as well as its visuals, but my horror fan friends tell me it’s a relatively tame beast as horror flicks go. But that part where Jules gets dragged away and has her head cut off, and she’s screaming? I love the movie but I never wanna hear that noise again. Apparently the scene is no great pants-wetter by horror standards, but I can still remember that scream, panicked but still recognizable, and then rising, rising into this tortured mindless nails-on-chalkboard shriek that washes away the character’s individual identity and leaves only the pain. The imagining the scream makes me do is out of all proportion to what I’m told the scene actually shows us. This sudden onslaught of very aggressive noise that almost always accompanies jump scares is a large part of the reason I almost never watch horror movies: it inevitably works on me, because I don’t get the split second visual warning that the camera telegraphs — at least in the more formulaic kind of jump scare. That and I’m a wuss.

Obviously the opposite is just as true: I can lose the full impact if the audible cues choose to go for something a little less in-your-face — if the audio is largely drowned out by music, for instance. I’m having trouble coming up with good specific examples right now, but I know I have several times been surprised by declarations that such-and-such a scene was gross, because while I can recognize that there’s violence and bodies and it’s probably not especially pleasant it’s tough to get the full visceral kick, the thing that prompts my mental image machine to recognize and conjure up the violence and the bodies, without the audible reminder. Violence is far from the only area where the audio sends mixed messages — watch a sex scene with your eyes closed sometime and you will experience some scary shit, I tell you what; seriously, a lot of the time I really can’t tell whether they’re enjoying themselves or trying to maim and kill each other –, but it is one of the audible elements that most often skews my impression of what’s happening.

If World War Z is the Best we Can do as a Culture I am Very, Very Frightened

 

            World War Z is the kind of movie that makes me feel like a resource-sucking waste of space for sitting in air-conditioned theatres watching movies instead of doing something with my life.  Not because it’s bad — though in a sense it is, intensely.  Or rather, not because it is bad in the way most of us usually index badness.

 

            This movie isn’t bad, doesn’t lance the blister of soul-draining meaninglessness that lurks beneath my relationship with pop-culture, because it is poorly-made.  No, this movie is bad because of its systematic, clockwork adequacy.  I have encountered very few things in the course of my life that are this suffocatingly okay.

 

            There is running and shooting and the making of serious faces, because people find all those things absorbing.  There is some creeping around dark corridors while zombies jump out and go “iiririllrllrrrerrg!”, because people like that too, just not too much or too intense with the “iiririllrllrrrerrg!”, because we need to keep this PG-13.  There are actors.  They say things.  They shoot guns.  Zombies are sweeping over the globe infecting everyone everywhere, and the actors who are in the movie and say the things and shoot the guns make concerned faces about this — you see how all the things that are in the movie are, like, tying together? One of them is Brad Pitt, and he protects his nice American family womenfolk.  Some of the other people fail, at various points throughout the film, to accept Brad Pitt’s recommendations as to best practices in zombie outbreak survival and management, and they die horribly, with the wrote degree of sadness or manful tooth-grinding attached depending on whether they were in the armed forces or not.  Some of them are people who live in places Brad Pitt travels on his quest to find a way to stop the zombie outbreak, and those people are proper fucked, because the plot follows Brad Pitt like an ill-favoured zombie-fuelled wind of destruction, so as to create action scenes for Brad Pitt to square jaw his way out of.

 

            But, despite all the things that happen in this bulletpoint apocalypse populated by the actors who say the things and shoot the guns, this isn’t really a story.  This is a movie executive’s well-oiled minimum input satisfaction machine: Everything in this movie is just precisely good enough, good enough to keep us sitting, to prompt us to tell our friends “yeah it was a fun way to pass the time at the movies I guess”, to stimulate us like the dormant zombies Brad Pitt encounters when we get to the creepy-infested-government-facility entry on the film’s checklist, waiting open-mouthed and drooling for something to happen.  (To give them credit I understand the infested government facility thing was a late addition at considerable extra expense and I thought it was one of the film’s best bits.  An inventive change from the usual big action scene finale.  Nothing is ever all bad, I guess, or even all meh.) It’s just so good enough, so cut and dried, oddly safe for a film about shrieking biting menaces who are coming to turn all of us into more like them.

 

            The plot is that there are zombies and OMG they are killing the shit out of us, and Brad Pitt has to travel the globe and find a way to make them stop — thus justifying the “World War” in the title, I suppose; where the novel World War Z by Max Brooks is a series of vignettes set all across the world and featuring different unconnected characters that together make up a journalistic history of the war against the undead, the movie strips this understandably tough-to-film premise out completely in favour of following Brad Pitt in his gallivanting to South Korea and Jerusalem and etc, as he demands answers in an earnest voice and merrily spreads destruction in his wake.  This is all held together by the movie’s precisely calculated sense of how often there needs to be a zombie outbreak in order to keep people from checking out.  Yes, this movie basically uses zombies like kitten yarn.  Apparently we can last about five minutes, maximum ten if there are people making intense faces and talking about military things in the interim.  So I guess we can be flattered and relieved that the people running World War Z’s stimulation engine have determined us to have attention spans roughly six times the length of those belonging to your average goldfish; I know I was.

 

            The characters are equally reducible, with no rough edges that might slice on the way down an audience’s delicate collective gullet.  Brad Pitt is a family man who is protecting his family because they’re the most important thing in the world, dammit.  Stoic soldier people are soldier people who are stoic.  Brad Pitt’s loving wife is a person who mostly says Brad Pitt’s name a lot, and the names of their beautiful beautiful American daughters who are young and helpless and don’t deserve to be killed by dirty foreign zombie viruses but don’t worry Brad Pitt will protect them; Brad Pitt has got that shit covered; do you see how we started this sentence talking about Brad Pitt’s wife and now we’re talking about Brad Pitt again? Do you see what the movie did there? It certainly hopes so.  The zombies growl and moan and sob out these long, haunting wails, but don’t worry they’re just walking virus vectors; we can totally shoot them.  Nothing is ambiguous.  Nothing makes demands on us.

 

            You know what? I enjoyed the time I spent watching World War Z.  Quite a lot.  I enjoyed and was grateful for the time with friends, and the film is, well, it’s a fun way to pass the time at the movies I guess.  Because it is very acceptably pulled together; that’s its power.  It’s just that as an exercise in the storytelling of sufficiency the movie scares me, and it scares me in a way that I cannot reconcile.  I cannot reconcile it because I love this big, flashy storytelling.  Examples of this kind of popular culture – not necessarily zombie narrative specifically, but big action-adventure science fiction — have substantially improved my life, provided me some of the geographies for the places my imagination roamed in middle school, when I had almost no one, and provided points of connection and reconnection for communicating with the friends I made and regained through high school and university, and you know what? A lot of it is just plain fun.  But I am also very conscious that many examples of such storytelling are animated by a ravening hunger, that underneath their pretty lights and iconic characters is an insatiable lust for gold, a howling skeletoal fiend with a hollow stomach dancing on a pile of coins with his mouth open to the sky, and that any instance of this entertainment will only be as complex and engaging as is deemed needful for the slaking of this endless want.  I love this stuff, and most of the time I think there can be good in it some places.  But I also hate its inherent calculating, exploitative cynicism profoundly, and find myself increasingly unsure of what it is worth.  And the two feelings are never far from one another these days.

 

            I look at Wikipedia and I see that this minimum input satisfaction machine cost a cool 190 million US dollars to produce, and I just don’t know what to do with that information.  I’m not sure I’m okay with it.  I’m not sure what not being okay with it would mean, and, conversely, what being okay with it would mean.  Am I a tool of the Man if I’m okay with it? Well, if you frame it that way …  kind of, yeah.  What do I do if I’m not okay with it? Stop going to movies with friends? What a phenomenally pointless, joy-killing gesture.

 

            I am naive as can be in the ways of economics, but I know that, for reasons probably not unlike those that prove trickledown economics to be bullshit perpetuated by the sickeningly rich, money spent in one sector in no way equates to money not spent in another, so I’ll spare us the over-simplistic “190 million dollars not spent on a big action movie could, like, feed a developing country for a decade” speel on the grounds that it insults everyone’s intelligence.  But, well, if nobody anywhere in the Global North could find any better use for 190 million bucks than the creation and distribution of World War Z, I think that would constitute a pretty definitive litmus test for the irrelevance of western civilization.

 

            I’m in dangerously prescriptive territory here, to my mind, in terms of the evaluation of what cultural objects, what pursuits, are and are not worthwhile.  I am young, privileged, and have never really suffered, I don’t think, but it is still my belief that fun, good, honest fun, is a priceless thing, a worthy thing, and that creative endeavour is too, in some nebulous indefinable way, even if only the most delusional English major believes it’s changing the world or whatever.  But what about when the fun is produced by formula, a formula that then gets plugged into the minimum input satisfaction machine in order to rev it up with just enough juice to keep us shuffling contentedly on? Is this question gonna keep me away from the movies? Of course not; what a ridiculous notion.  It’s just that I don’t know how I feel about that.  It’s just…  It’s just …

 

It’s just so much for so little. 190 million US dollars.  Ouch.

“Does He Still Stand for Truth, Justice, All That Stuff?”: Thoughts, Personal and Idiosyncratic, on the Appeal of the Superhero as Saviour Figure

Brian Singer’s Superman Returns, the most recent attempt to bring perhaps the most iconic and feelgood superhero to the screen and make hundreds of millions thereby prior to this summer’s upcoming Man of Steel, is a film which might best and most politely be described as “forgettable”. Kind of like the better class of takeout meal: it assuaged your hunger just fine, it tasted perfectly decent while you were eating it, it didn’t reenact trench warfare in your stomach and make you feel like a warmed-over dead thing afterwards, but you’re not going to be revisiting it in fond memories or extolling the experience to your friends. Personally, all I remember about the plot is that Superman probably has a kid, and Lex Luther is doing something where his new evil scheme involves selling real-estate, and at one point in the movie he holds aloft a hunk of crystal-stuff and trills “Carararararyptonite!”, like a bird that craves attention. And the music’s good. But there are just a couple of scenes from the film that have really, really stuck with me, and I think the reason they’ve stuck with me is that they slice to the heart of the superhero’s appeal as a narrative.

In one of these sequences, Superman takes Lois Lane flying above Metropolis, and lets her listen in on his super-hearing. I think they’re flying, anyway; why they had to be flying to share this superhearing is unclear, except it gives the movie an excuse to play the kind of upwardly-mobile elevator music that fantasy movies like to play when pretty white people go airborne. Voice after voice echoes over the music, faint but perfectly audible, crying out their concerns / hopes / immediate life-threatening perils. And overtop of this chorus Superman questions the assumptions made by an article Lois Lane has apparently written about how he is no longer necessary, and he says something like: “You wrote that humanity doesn’t need a saviour. But every day I hear people crying for one.”

This acknowledgement in the middle of an action film that people want and sometimes need help is powerful, for me. I think it is central to what makes superhero stories compelling, this idea that there is a person who not only has the power to help other people, but is called to do so, “in brightest day, (or) darkest night”, because, like Uncle Ben said, “with great power comes great responsibility”, and I can’t even type those things without smiling a bit. This idea that someone is coming. Or some thing, a force beyond the everyday, a force that really can help you. Or, no, that’s wrong again: a combination of both these things, a force, yes, but one taken up by a person, by a figure both extraordinary enough to feel like a saviour and human enough to be admirable on a person-to-person level, someone who can give numinous, unknowable power a face and then use that face (which presumably has a mouth) to say “it will somehow be okay”. This, it seems to me, is the beating heart of what makes superhero stories not just enjoyable but also so profoundly reassuring.

And it’s a wonderful story.

But what if you cannot, on a fundamental level, believe that anyone is coming?

There’s a moment in Joss Whedon’s awesome deconstruction of superheroism set to music, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog — have you seen it? If not, stop reading my bullshit immediately and fix this oversight why do you hate everything that is cool?!

Back? Awesome.

There’s a moment in Dr. Horrible, and this is a spoiler, where the main character’s clash with his nemesis, the egotistical superheroic poser Captain Hammer, has fatally wounded the girl our villainous main man has been drooling after throughout. And as Penny, that’s the girl, fades away, she looks up at Billy, that’s Dr. Horrible, and says: “It’s okay. Captain Hammer will save us.”

Meanwhile, Captain Hammer has fled the scene, pushing the innocent bystanders whose champion he purported to be as long as it got him attention from his path, shrieking to this general tune (my dvd’s at home): “Aw, I’m in pain! I think this is what pain feels like! Oh mama! Someone maternal! Get out of my way!”

Whedon’s tragicomedy shows us a world where people are crushed between superpowered forces who are egotistical and misguided rather than benevolent, with no champion to turn to. A world where no one is coming. And, casting my limited gaze around the world in which we find ourselves, full of its superpowered corporate entities, political bodies vested with the power to break everything from nations to the lives of single parents on welfare the members of which cannot agree on where the sun rises in the morning, and national armies whose answer to defending the homeland is to build ever more advanced death machines and call them things like “the Hellfire Missile” that make it sound like they took Command and Conquer a little too thoroughly to heart when they were kids, I have to say the vision Dr. Horrible proposes feels, at least to me, like one with an awful lot of traction.

Confronted with the reality that Captain Hammer will not save us, that Captain Hammer is a dickhead of epic proportions, what do we do? I think it’s a useful question.

But every story lies. This is no grand insight; master storytellers from Ursula Le Guin on backward and forward through the alphabet have said it many times. Stories don’t lie because they’re malevolent, they lie because they are by their nature limited, asking us to enjoy and perhaps think about a limited slice of imaginary life, which will highlight specific perspectives. Dr. Horrible presents us with a dim, nihilistic view of the superhero as saviour, and I think it’s one worth paying heed to, but I also don’t think it, “like, tells it like it really is, man”, because of course it doesn’t; how could it? (And of course Whedon himself has balanced what he has to say about the inspirational qualities of superheroic saviour figures in The Avengers, which a number of people seem to have liked a good deal.) I cannot quite, and this is where we gesture outward to the broader implications of pop-cultural narratives of the saviour, believe that our universe is an ordered one with a benevolent force that really will be there at need, but I also think that people can be pretty great, that people can help one another and that they are deserving of this help, that sometimes — not all the time, but sometimes — someone will help things work out, and maybe some of these people are aided in their call to be awesome by their belief in a higher power, and some are not. So both types of superhero narratives, the wide-eyed and the cynical, are helpful, I think, when taken in aggregate: the one to inspire and the other to remind us that, come on, we live here, and sometimes it sucks here, and we are all just people muddling through.

What with one thing and another I’ve watched The Dark Knight Rises three times now. My opinion’s wobbled back and forth: Sometimes I find the movie’s wonderfully theatrical take on Bane an absolute joy to listen to, and sometimes I wish he’d just shut up. Sometimes I find Bruce Wane’s journey back toward wanting to live very powerful, and sometimes it just feels like manpain. But there’s one scene that Christopher Nolan has suckered me with all three times, the calculating manipulative bastard, and it’s the one right near the end where Talia’s nuke is about to wipe out Gothum City.

I mean, I don’t, you know, cry or anything, at all. I just shed a single man-tear. On the inside.

Shut up.

Batman is flying the nuke out into the ocean, but people don’t know that yet. They brace for impact. The ones who actually know how big the nuke is and what it will do know this is the end. When it goes off the city is ash; people can tuck themselves into the crash position all they want and it will make no difference. They tell people to take cover anyway. What else can they do?

And then this little kid — of course it is a little kid, Nolan you fucker — looks up, and sees that they are saved. He calls out. “Look”, he shouts. Is told to get down. He insists:

“No, look! It’s Batman!”

Yes it is, kid, yes it is. How useful is it outside the story, how much an aspiration to the helpers and an inspiration to those who need help? I don’t know. But yes, yes it is Batman. And that feels very right.